Sorrow in Suruc “FOLLOW the flies; you’ll find human flesh.” These grisly directions were offered at the scene of a suicide-bomb attack by a suspected Islamic State (IS) terrorist in Suruc, a town on Turkey’s border with Syria, on July 20th. Sure enough, flies hovered over charred remains in the garden of the Amara cultural centre, where at least 32 people were killed and around 100 more injured.
The bomber was identified as Seyh Abdurrahman Alagaoz, a 20-year-old from Adiyaman, a conservative province in the mainly Kurdish southeast, which is prime recruiting ground for jihadists. Should his links to IS be proven, the implications will be dire. This would be the group’s first big strike inside Turkey; it would serve as a warning that support for Syrian Kurds could cause violence to spill across the border, and complicate the American-led campaign against the jihadists. It would also increase tensions between Turkey’s ruling Islamists and its own restive Kurds. On July 22nd Kurdish militants said they had killed two Turkish policemen in “revenge” for the big bomb.
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